Seventies-style souvenir

This project is a little different. Allee Willis did hire me once but that’s not what I want to highlight here. I want to share something I made to impress her, to really show that I’m a quirky creator like her.

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Backstory: Ok, so, I met Allee in 2011. She introduced me another Fluff superfan like me, Susan Olsen, aka TV’s Cindy Brady! I soon had a vision that of all of us would go on a cross-country field trip, that we would travel to Massachusetts for the What the Fluff? Festival.

 

So I made it happen! I called the organizer and she not only invited both Allee and Susan to be special guests, but she asked my young daughter to judge the Fluff cooking contest with an astronaut who actually took the marshmallow spread to space. 

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Naturally, this was all quite thrilling and I was pinching myself a lot!

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Problem: Now, before we all traveled to the east coast together that fall, Allee invited us to her magnificent, pink, kitsch-filled home in Los Angeles, Willis Wonderland. That’s where she would host a glorious pre-Fluff Fest party for us.

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That presented a good problem, the kind I live for. What could I bring to the party that would really tickle her specifically?

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Solution: An idea soon came to me. Since I would be sightseeing in Hollywood during the weekend of the party, I started imagining what kind of souvenir I could conceivably find in an “Allee-verse.” I got my then-partner, a graphic artist, to help make my concept real.

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Results: Allee first gained fame in the seventies as a songwriter for Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.” So I wanted this fake souvenir to feel like it was from that era. Remember those “Someone went somewhere and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirts? I felt Willis Wonderland deserved its own.

 

On the day of the party, I put the bootleg-style tees in a generic plastic shopping bag and pretended I had just bought them on Hollywood Avenue. Each of the moms, the Wonderland “tourists,” got one. Allee was first perplexed, then amused, as were the recipients.